What Price Liberty ?

A speech presented on the 28th of February by the Director of JUST West Yorkshire, Ratna Lachman at a seminar entitled “From Belfast to Bradford” held at Bradford University.

1999 was for community activists and professionals like me a watershed in race relations– it marked the dawn of what we now refer to as the post-Macpherson paradise.

The Report into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence had just been published and the Metropolitan police had been condemned for making “fundamental errors” in the case which had let Stephen’s 5 murders off scot free. In many senses his murder was not exceptional – it was the death of yet another teenager whose investigation had not been taken seriously. It was another murder where his friend Dwayne Brooks - who was with Stephen when he was attacked - was treated as a suspect and not a witness. However what the Inquiry did do was give Black communities a language which finally spoke to their experiences with the police, public authorities and the criminal justice system.

Lord Macpherson who was leading the Inquiry called it Institutional racism which he defined as

"the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin"

The flurry of activity which followed the publication of the Report – more specifically the amendment to the Race Relations Act – finally meant that Black communities could hold public services accountable for failing them.

This euphoria was however short-lived – as the riots erupted in the North a year later, the twin towers in America was attacked and the London bombings on the 7^th of July 2005 killed 52 lives – both the discourse and the race relations landscape has changed beyond recognition.

Government ministers and those who spoke on behalf of Black communities started talking about parallel lives, community cohesion, integration and citizenship. What nobody talked about was the parallel lives of white rural communities in affluent neighbourhoods like Ilkley, or predominantly white working class neighbourhoods. Suddenly the responsibility for good community relations was laid at the door of mostly deprived inner city BME communities and the two-way social contract of rights and responsibilities between citizen and government quickly forgotten.

One month after the 7/7 bombings – in a speech to journalists - Tony Blair signaled the change in the government mood when he announced that “the rules of the game have changed.”
He was right. They had changed. The Islamic Human Rights Commission, along with human rights organisations like The Monitoring Group were reporting an exponential increase in racist attacks on Muslims across the country.

This statement had immense significance for Black people because the war on terror which the government was waging was cast as a war on Islamic terrorism – unlike the British government’s battle against the IRA – this version of extremism not only threatened the very core of western values i.e. democracy, free speech, liberty, human rights, but also the British way of life which was characterised by fair play, justice and respect.

The press and media bought into this rhetoric, as did the racists and the fascists. But if Al Qaida’s version of terrorism was aimed at destroying western values, then it is my contention that our responses to this terror threat has effectively struck a nail in the coffin of those very values we purport to defend.

Every time our elected representatives in Parliament chose to increase the number of days that suspects can be detained for questioning without charge from 7 to 14 to 28 to 42 and possibly 56 days if the government has its way, or between 50 to 90 days if the Chief of the Metropolitan police Ian Blair has his, then what we undermine is our whole judicial process.

Every time the government threatens to either amend or abrogate from the Human Rights Act in response to obstacles on the path to introducing ever more draconian anti-terror measures, what we sacrifice is our moral authority on the world stage.

Raising the bar on liberty and human rights on the basis that the police and intelligence service say they need the option of holding terror suspects for up to 90 days as terror cases become more complicated is not a good enough reason.

If true, why do our European allies the French and the Spanish, who have also suffered terror attacks hold suspects for 6 and 8 days respectively. Even Russia and Turkey whom the West has accused of a poor human rights record hold suspects for 5 and 7.5 days respectively.

Human rights lawyers will tell you that most terror suspects confess within the first week because our intelligence and security services are among the best in the world. But this hasn’t stopped the government from creating increasingly innovative ways of incarcerating people. The world of control orders is inhabited by potential suspects who are under house arrest with severe restrictions placed on their liberties.

You could argue that the price is worth paying if it saves innocent lives. But if the person who is living under house arrest does not know why he or she is being detained, or for how long he is going to be detained and is unable to challenge the evidence in a court of law either because the intercept or bugging evidence is inadmissible or because it would reveal the intelligence source, what this does is undermine the very fabric of our entire legal system which is built on the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial.

In the last few years we have not only witnessed individuals coming under assault but the entire Muslim community. Imagine if you were told in the face of the far right threat the government had earmarked £88m in a Preventing Violent Extremism Fund in an effort to get the entire white community to reject far right ideology, isolate extremists by co-operating with the security services and to develop their own capacity to deal with the problem

There would be an outcry because it would be tantamount to labelling the entire white community as fascists and it would be akin to asking white people to spy on each other and participate in the ‘criminalisation’ of young people.
Sadly that is exactly what is happening – increasingly local authorities are becoming an extension of the security arm of the state. The extent of their collusion in the war on terror is evident in a number of areas:

Between 2005 to 2006 nearly 800 public bodies between them made an average of nearly 1000 requests a day for communications data, including actual phone taps, mobile phone records, emails or web search histories and snail mail.

Add to this an allocation of $926 million for counterterrorism work in 2006 and an additional $1.4 billion last year, it does not take a genius to work out what the impact of this level of funding is going to be for Muslim communities.

In Yorkshire’s context where the security services have recently established a branch in Leeds and the implications for how this information and this level of investment is going to be used has a profound impact on communities who are already under unprecedented surveillance.

So what of the future? Trevor Philips of the Commission for Racial Equality (now the Commission for Equality and Human Rights) said not long ago that we were sleep walking our way into segregation. I would like to maintain that we are sleep walking our way into a surveillance society. The us and them divide which the government has sought to foster in this so called war on terror is a smoke screen – the us is them and the them is us.

When the powers of the terrorism act are used to evict an 82 year old for calling Jack Straw a liar during a speech on the government’s Iraq foreign policy at the Labour Party conference, when the police use anti-terrorism powers to deter peaceful protest by those opposing the expansion of Heathrow and when police unlawfully detain two coach loads of protesters, attending an authorised anti-war demonstration, then we know that as a society we have started the slow descent to a surveillance, if not a police state.

I would like to end with some statistics:

• there are 4.2 million CCTVs across the country and the numbers are growing
• the UK national DNA database holds the genetic profile of 3.9 million people, including 100,000 children many of whom have never been convicted of an offence
• the UK national database has 7 million finger prints – the majority of whom have not been convicted of a crime

Between 11^th September 2001 (or 9/11) and December 2006, 1,200 arrests were made under anti-terror legislation. 40 were convicted and more than half the suspects held were subsequently released without any charge. The question we all have to ask ourselves is simple – what is the price we are prepared to pay for the liberty and human rights of 60 million people?

Thank You